Plastic Pilot

Any piece of equipment on board can fail at any time, and all pilots train, to be ready to cope with any failure. This picture has been taken by a passenger while my instructor decided it was time to practice landings with no air-speed indicator.

Years after this training session, I think it’s easy to cope with that: use power setting and horizon (natural or artificial), and airspeed will be fine anyway. My instructor demonstrated that it’s possible to fly without instruments, but also that instruments can be a distraction. I had a tendency to focus too much on instruments instead of flying the plane. Because of the time I spent flying simulators ? May be.

During one of my first IFR training sessions, the instructor let me get establish on the ILS, and then failed the ILS indicator by pulling the circuit breaker. We were IMC, and he told me to simply fly the horizon. After two minutes, he pushed the circuit breaker in. The needles were still centered. Ah, all the fun we can have in the simulator.

Another funny and interesting exercise was to fly a DA40 with a locked stick. The instructor was holding it with his knees, and I had to fly using rudder, trim and power. After a couple of test manoeuvers, I flew a nearly perfect approach to flare.

These were all simulated failures, and this makes the situation easier. Nevertheless, it was possible to cope with these failures relatively easily. The frustrating part is that such exercises frequently result in better flying than flying in normal conditions ! Does it comes from the extra concentration ? From some adrenaline ?

So, are our planes loaded with useless equipment ? Not exactly. But most can fail without endangering the flight… as long as the pilot is well trained. Some light aircrafts fly with almost no instruments, no flaps, and they are as safe as more equipped ones. Not all kind of operations do require GPS, HSI, auto-pilot, G1000.